The knife she took was a Buck hunting knife with a bone handle and a four-inch blade. The kind of knife that would get her expelled and maybe arrested if anyone found it. She kept it hidden, and in a few minutes she planned to slip out to the parking lot and slash all four of Tucker’s tires. Why? He’d Photoshopped her face onto a bunch of downloaded porn of really fat women having ugly kinds of sex. Bizarre stuff that Dahlia, who considered herself open-minded and worldly, couldn’t quite grasp. And then he glued them to the outside of the first-floor girl’s bathroom.
Tucker didn’t get caught because guys like Tucker don’t get caught. Word got around, though. Tucker was tight with Chuck, Dault, and Marcy. This was the latest battle in the war. Her enemies were persistent and effortlessly cruel. Dahlia was clever and careful.
Then, as we know, the world ended.
— 4 —
Here’s how it happened as far as Dahlia was concerned.
She didn’t watch the news that morning, hadn’t read the papers—because who reads newspapers?—and hadn’t cruised the top stories on Twitter. The first she knew about anything going wrong was when good old Marcy Van Der Poop came screaming into the girls’ room.
Dahlia was in a stall and she tensed. Not because Marcy was screaming—girls scream all the time; they have the lungs for it, so why not?—but because it was an inconvenient time. Dahlia hated using the bathroom for anything more elaborate than taking a pee. Last night’s Taco Thursday at the Allgood house was messing with that agenda in some pretty horrific ways. Dahlia had waited until the middle of a class period to slip out and visit the most remote girls’ room in the entire school for just this purpose.
But in came Marcy, screaming her head off.
Dahlia jammed her hand against the stall door to make sure it would stay shut.
She waited for the scream to turn into a laugh. Or to break off and be part of some phone call. Or for it to be anything except what it was.
Marcy kept screaming, though.
Until she stopped.
Suddenly.
With a big in-gulp of air.
Dahlia leaned forward to listen. There was only a crack between the door and frame and she could see a sliver of Marcy as she leaned over the sink.
Was she throwing up?
Washing her face?
What the hell was she doing?
Then she saw Marcy’s shoulders rise and fall. Very fast. The way someone will when . . .
That’s when she heard the sobs.
Long. Deep. Badly broken sobs.
The kind of sobs Dahlia was way too familiar with.
Out there, on the other side of that sliver, Marcy Van Der Meer’s knees buckled and she slid down to the floor. To the floor of the girls’ bathroom. A public bathroom.
Marcy curled herself into a hitching, twitching, spasming ball.
She pulled herself all the way under the bank of dirty sinks.
Sobbing.
Crying like some broken thing.
Dahlia, despite everything, felt something in her own eyes. On her cheeks.
She tried to be shocked at the presence of tears.
Marcy was the hateful witch. If she wasn’t messing with Dahlia directly, then she was getting her friends and minions to do it. She was the subject of a thousand of Dahlia’s fantasies about vehicular manslaughter, about STDs that transformed her into a mottled crone, about being eaten by rats.